Posts Tagged ‘media’

This piece was pretty much the last political cartoon I did for nearly six years — for what was probably the last Counterinaugural event put on by the old NYC YIP posse that I know of. Not having the Internet in those days, getting your message out and networking with folks of like mind were damn’ near impossible in the face of growing media oppression (in the form of increasing Drug War propagandizing) and growing hostility by society at large towards anyone or anything “different”.

Left activism and political cartooning, in this kind of environment, were getting to be a seemingly hopeless grind of years with no hope of results, and often backward progress. The Yipster Times/Overthrow outfit put out its last issue at or about 1986 or so, and outlets were becoming scarce already before that. Rather than give myself a nervous breakdown howling into the wind, I went back to doing what I enjoyed in art school: happy partying hippie comix, hippies happily outwitting cops comix, hippies trying to nab spare Dead tickets comix, at the Dead Relix fanzine, also out of New York. It didn’t pay much more than weed money, but I already had a day job, and had an outlet to do entirely fun cartoons with no redeeming political commentary whatsofreakinever, at least for a few years.
medium-res jpg image, 323k; high-res tif image,4.9mb

For a while, it seemed like every damn’ time you turned around, either Time or Newsweek or the Washington Post or Parade Magazine or NBC was doing smarmy photo spreads and interviews with Reagan on his ranch — at least Reagan was smart enough to stick to sitting on a horse looking all manly and Presidential, unlike a certain Texas brush-clearing President we all know — and damn’ near causing normal peoples’ heads to explode from the sheer volume of aw-shucks down-home patriotism, feigned cowboy attitude, and religiosity.

As a public service, I presented through the Yipster Times/Overthrow this undercover report on the real Reagan Ranch, not the folksy simulacrum presented for Time, Newsweek, Parade and People.

Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the President, the Vice President and the Secretary of State in that order, and should the President decide he wants to transfer the helm to the Vice President, he will do so. He has not done that. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the Vice President and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.
–Secretary of State, fmr. Gen. Alexander Haig, speaking to reporters after the assassination attempt on President Reagan

Ahh, who can forget Alexander Haig — White House Chief of Staff under Nixon, Secretary of State under Reagan, Allied Supreme Being in Europe, a guy who looks like he could play himself in a Robert Ludlum story? And, who can forget that memorable occasion — while we’re on the subject of the media and government getting weird together — when in answer to some question or another, Secretary Haig blurts out an assertion that he was “in control here” following the assassination attempt on Reagan downtown?

Leave it to my pal Gregor, who ran the Yippies’ print shop in DC — and his dryly-barbed sense of humor to give my muse a kick in the ass, with his comments that Haig was behaving like the coup leader and El Presidente of some Central American banana republic, giving his first address to the People, and his sarcastic throwing of stiff-armed fist salutes into the air and shouting, “Haig, Haig, Haig For Life!”